PIAAC Reading Component: A Conceptual Framework

Governments and other stakeholders have become increasingly interested in assessing the skillsof their adult populations in order to examine how well prepared they are to meet the challenges of themodern knowledge-based society. The current paper provides a conceptual framework for the assessmentof reading component skills in the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of AdultCompetencies (PIAAC). The assessment of component skills is intended to provide a greater level ofinformation about the skills of individuals with low levels of literacy proficiency than has been availablefrom previous international assessments. The ‘component skills ’identified for the assessment arevocabulary knowledge, sentence processing and passage comprehension.